"Clayton Emery - Blood Sacrifice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

scared to even inspect 'em and kill the golden goose!"
"One machine works just fine, and they got scientists workin' on the rest," Bullock
dismissed. "Anyway, it ain't your problem."

"It WAS. We just didn't pay attention. They find a goddamn machine that turns out red
guards, and the next thing you know, a shadow government's built an army of 'em. We wake
up one morning and bingo! a new president's spouting, 'It's time to assume our rightful place
in the galaxy!'"

"There goes your mouth again, getting your face in trouble." Bullock was nervous too, a little.
"Unbelievable the armor machine makes Earthers invincible. Just Earthers..."

"You're boring me."

Jessup stared at the nearest guard, clad crown to foot in armor red as crusted blood. Its
surface was pebbled and dimpled like a scorpion's carapace and matched the wearer's
shape, for each suit custom-grew on a lucky recipient, and would neither fit nor function for
anyone else. Once fully grown, it locked into a hardness that few weapons could penetrate,
yet flexed where a man needed to move, and could be pulled off and on like a rubber wetsuit
-- in most cases. "A wedding of alien biotech, alien nanotech, and human physiology,"
experts explained, and no more.
Facing a dim branch corridor, a red guard screwed up his head lamp so a white blob
danced on gray mist. Guards patted their rifles, fiddled with settings, muttered into mikes.
Scorpion activity always picked up when prisoners were "processed."

"They smell blood and come running." Jessup spat. "It's not right, none of it..."
"It gives us someplace to stow loudmouths like you."

"They said prisoners were shipped out to terraform. Then that they were easing
overpopulation... No one believed it."
The pair crept under the stone archway. Ahead a prisoner gibbered, and Jessup stumbled.
Bullock eased him along in the light gravity, gently as guiding a child up stairs.
"Did you turn me in?" Jessup grated. "Tell a dying man."

Hanging onto Jessup's bicept, Bullock shrugged. "If I hadn't, someone else would've. You
were talking insurrection."

"I wasn't organizing resistance! I was just asking questions!"
"Dumb."

Jessup closed his eyes, for he agreed, then looked around, mesmerized. Walls and floor
undulated like frozen waves. Wild sigils that no one could interpret danced on the walls. In a
sloping wall, two black chutes beckoned. Men were busy. Technicians supervised. Medicos
took pulses and thumped chests. Army clerks marked clipboards. A dozen blood-spattered
MPs labored with prisoners. A red guard stood at ease, rifle strapped across his chest.
"Six weeks," Bullock breathed, "and I'll be wearing the finest suit of armor that ever existed.
Then we take on the Wild Black, where NOTHING can hurt us."

"Keep your head down," Jessup needled. It rankled the Red Guards that the neck joint,
where the lumpy helmet curled to padded shoulders, was the one chink in the holy armor.